Protecting the integrity and intellectual property of a song can be a troublesome business. The musical archives are littered with rows over the ownership of music and claims by composers that guitar riffs, string arrangements or entire compositions have been ripped off.

For Carol Decker and Ron Rogers, the song-writing duo and key members of 1980s pop group T'Pau, the method of protection when they started out was age-old.

"We used to put a song in an envelope and post it to ourselves," recalls Decker, who now performs as a solo artist in concerts with other 1980s acts including Kim Wilde, Paul Young, Midge Ure, Belinda Carlisle and Bananarama.

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"If you did that and there was later a dispute, you could prove that it was yours. There have been massive disputes over the years about the ownership of songs. You have to put your music out in the marketplace and it means you are very vulnerable."

T'Pau was right to take intellectual property so seriously. Its China in Your Hands song, written by Rogers and Decker and released on Siren Records, part of Virgin Records, was the longest-running number one single in 1987, topping the charts for six weeks and staying in the top 40 for 15 weeks.

Now, after a 15-year break, partly connected to the breakdown of their own 13-year relationship, Decker and Rogers are writing songs together again and releasing a new single performed by Decker called Just Dream on September 2.

However, much has changed in the music world since their last collaborations, with the advent of the internet, digital downloads and music-sharing sites.

Decker and Rogers are producing the single themselves, with no record company, publisher or manager behind them, and choosing to release it on a download-only basis on music websites including i-Tunes. They wanted what Decker describes as "a creative space with no boundaries and no infrastructure" for purely creative motives.

However, this approach also meant being in the same kind of uncharted territory in terms of intellectual property protection that they encountered early in their musical careers.

They looked for a technological answer and found that a modern alternative to the post-it-to-yourself method was being offered by a start-up company near where Rogers now lives in Monmouth.

Codel was founded by James Zorab to develop a technology that creates a unique fingerprint or "Codelmark" of digital files and registers them on a database where they are stored indefinitely for future authentication.

Verification can then be done by anyone who receives or has access to original Codelmarked content either directly through the company's website or through interactions with other software.

The system, developed with US computer group Sun Microsystems, also works for files such as word documents and voice files.

It has been taken up on a three-year licence by Postwatch, the government watchdog for the Post Office, which is using it to secure its electronic records, while HSBC and another major bank are evaluating it.

However, Codel is allowing individuals to download Codel for free from the www.codelmark.com website and register up to 50 music files, or any other kind of files, each year.

Decker and Rogers decided to take advantage of it to encode and protect all of their material.

"We are creating a new model for writing and creating. It's an experiment," explains Rogers. "We intend to do everything ourselves without the traditional support infrastructure, so there are lots of practical issues to address.

"This makes Codelmarking our songs all the more important, since we don't have control over distribution channels, and it provides us with a measure of protection against plagiarism.

"The web is a big place and one's music can crop up anywhere. It will provide peace of mind at this stage."

Decker now lives in Stoke Row, near Henley-on-Thames, where her husband Richard Coates runs a pub called The Cherry Tree Inn. She says: "There's a website at www.tpau.co.uk and I have a MySpace page. Codel really is a 21st Century solution to what we are trying to do. It enables us to register when works are created.

"After 20 years in this business, we are still learning things because we have to do everything ourselves now.

"Frankly, I find all the business details very boring. I just want to write songs and sing them, but you have to grow up. I would recommend Codel to any young and emerging artists."

Rogers adds: "We are determined to make it work.

"The web has opened up huge new possibilities for artists and what is great for us is that we are not starting from scratch - there is a backlog of music already there and people know us.

"The main issues are that we want to write songs as and when we want, and quickly make them accessible to the public. We'll wait and see what happens."

Codel also provides an independent third party "escrow" service that proves authenticity by showing the originator, integrity of content and date and time of registration.

Codel is 54 per cent owned by Zorab, who has invested £1m in the company and plans to float on the Alternative Investment Market within three years.

He believes that the "authentication market" will grow to about £300m a year by 2009.

"There are lots of applications for this technology," he says. "It can be used to protect intellectual property such as music, images, authorship, designs and patents.

"It can also be used to prove website and email content, establish the veracity of photographs submitted to support insurance claims and denote whether artwork and Word documents are original."

Zorab adds: "It's going to grow exponentially as more and more media switch to digital formats. I think that in five years' time, nearly all software and applications will have Codel built into them."

The aspiring musician

Aspiring musicians once dreamt of a contract that would enable them to put their compositions on vinyl, or on to compact discs. Now, most people who know how to strum a guitar and sing a few songs are also adept at recording their own sound and putting it on a social networking site such as MySpace.com.

James Welch, 20, is no exception. About to enter the final year of a music production course at Leeds College of Music, Welch sings and plays the piano and guitar and also produces records for other musicians. He plays with his group No Way Off The Roof, which he describes as "mainly a rock'n'roll covers band".

As part of his course, he will write and record 13 tracks for an album. He plans to protect all his compositions with Codelmarking. "I have a MySpace page at MySpace.com/Jameswelch59 where I post songs as uncompressed WAV files," he says, "but I don't make the songs available for download.

"I don't mind people listening to my music for free but I released a small EP a while ago and I used Codel to protect the compositions that I write and record. I think it's very important. The fact that you can put your brand of ownership on music in this way is phenomenal. A friend has shelves full of unopened envelopes, date-stamped so he can prove his ownership. This is much easier."

The law

The test of Codelmarking a song, or any other data or voice file, has to be whether it will stand up in court as proof of creation and ownership. Jane Hill, a barrister specialising in information security law based at Lincoln's Inn, London, says the technology could provide useful evidence. "The technology that Codel employs gives rise to a certain piece of evidence that proves certain things that you may want to prove in a court," she says.

"The way the Codelmark works is that it provides evidence of data integrity. Codelmarking a work can be used as proof that it has not been changed. If the Codelmarks don't match, then the work has been changed and is not the original."

Codel hopes to become the standard way of proving such authenticity. However, Hill says: "Whether or not it is standardised has little relevance from a legal standpoint. Courts accept all sorts of things as evidence. It's a question of whether it's probative and cogent and reliable.

"By Codelmarking something you are effectively getting a certified copy of the original, which endures for a long period of time. It doesn't prevent anyone changing things but it does give you reliable evidence of what the original looks like."